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The Midlands3Cities Doctoral Training Partnership (M3C) is a collaboration between the University of Birmingham, Birmingham City University, De Montfort University, University of Leicester, Nottingham Trent University and The University of Nottingham. M3C is awarding up to 80 PhD Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) studentships for UK/EU applicants for 2018 entry.

M3C provides research candidates with expert supervision (including cross-institutional supervision where appropriate), research training and access to a wide range of facilities, cohort events and placement opportunities with regional, national and international partners in the cultural, creative and heritage sectors.

English at Nottingham Trent University is inviting applications from students whose research interests include:

American literature and cultural history

Colonial, postcolonial, global, and world literatures and cultures

Creative writing and critical-creative research

Gender and sexuality

Literary and cultural theory

Literature and technology

Literature, film and visual culture

Magazine and periodical writing

Modernist and postmodernist literature

Poetry and poetics

Popular fiction

Race, Rights and Activist Writing

Romantic literature

Shakespeare and Early Modern writing

TRAVEL WRITING

War and literature

Women’s writing

The deadline for M3C funding applications is Monday 15 January 2018, by which time students must have applied for a place to study and have ensured that two academic references are submitted to the home university on the correct M3C form. For full details of eligibility, funding, research supervision areas and CDA projects, and for dates of our November application writing workshops, please visit www.midlands3cities.ac.uk or contact enquiries@midlands3cities.ac.uk.

Travel writing as a field of study owes a great deal to “theory” – the critical methodologies that emerged from structuralism and the social movements of the ’60s and ’70s. Theory, in turn, owes a good deal to travel writing, whose hybrid, biographical, and often non-canonical texts were invaluable source materials for those social movements and poststructuralist critical trends. One of the innovations of Edward Said’s landmark Orientalism (1978) was precisely its critical focus on travel writing; in this way the book synthesized broader intellectual concerns about travel, power, desire and discourse in a postcolonial, globalizing world. Over the subsequent years, postcolonial studies, anthropology, cultural studies and literary criticism, among other fields, increasingly drew on travel writing to illuminate the social and political stakes of travel, tourism, and the representation of other cultures – or what a suspicious Paul de Man, still beholden in 1979 to a certain Eurocentric formalism, disparaged as “the foreign affairs, the external politics of literature.”

Forty years after Orientalism, this special issue of Studies in Travel Writing reconsiders the place of travel writing in theory, and of theory in the study of travel writing. The editors are especially interested in work that can speak to the political and social stakes of travel and theory in the present historical conjuncture. What are the prospects for theory and what are the stakes of travel writing in a time of mass migrations, social disruptions, ecological crises and shifting geopolitics? Articles must be limited to 7,000 - 10,000 words. Topics may include travel writing and:

Indigenous studies

Postcolonial studies

Critical Race Studies

Queer theory & gender studies

Ecological studies

Refugees, migrations and immigration

Biopolitics and security

Plasticity

Cosmopolitanism

Mobility and disability

Technology

World literature

Send abstracts of 250 words by September 15, 2017 to jculbert@mail.ubc.ca, with subject heading “Travel and Theory Submission.”

There, through the last of the sentences, just there--through the last of the sentences, the road--

​– Carolyn Forché, ‘Travel Papers’ (2011)

Whether local or global, by foot or by ferry, we tend to look upon journeys in terms of departure and arrival. However much we enjoy or endure it, travel from one place to another is often understood simply as a means of getting from A to B.

But what happens en route? How are our thoughts set in motion during these journeys? What is the relationship between our inner selves and our surroundings? How do we interact with or ignore our fellow passengers? How does the mode of travel affect our perception of the environment? Do journeys change or confirm us? Are we different beings while travelling? And what happens when we are forced to travel, or when we no choice but to stay put?​In Transit is a collaboration between the Emma Press and the Centre for Travel Writing Studies at Nottingham Trent University, edited by Dr Sarah Jackson and Prof. Tim Youngs. ​

​We invite submissions of poems that deal with the experience of being in transit. Poems may describe journeys undertaken on foot, by bicycle, motorcycle, wheelchair, ambulance, bus, train, plane, boat or other mode of transport.

We welcome both formal and experimental work but are especially interested in contributions that employ poetic form to convey the sense of motion.

By Ben Stubbs (University of South Australia)

Dr Ben Stubbs is a travel writer and academic based in Adelaide, Australia. He obtained his PhD at the University of Canberra in 2014. His thesis explored ‘Travel Writing and the Pluralising of History. A case study from New Australia, Paraguay.’ He is a regular contributor to literary journals and newspapers in Australia and overseas. His latest research and travel writing project focuses on nocturnal travel writing and Madrid where he explores the stories of the people and the places in the Spanish capital between the hours of 7pm and 7am. Here Ben talks about his visit to the Centre for Travel Writing Studies last February, when he was completing the manuscript for his latest travel book, After Dark: A Nocturnal Exploration of Madrid (Signal Books, 2016).

The author in Madrid after dark. Image courtesy of Ben Stubbs.

Remembering the late Patrick Leigh Fermor in June 2011, Jan Morris commented: “Few of us want to be called travel writers nowadays, the genre having been cheapened and weakened.” An early career researcher in travel writing, this sentiment filled me with dread as I began my position as a lecturer at the University of South Australia. Indeed, travel writing courts controversy on many fronts, from the ethics of representation to the veracity of travel writers creating “mock ordeals” within their accounts. As Folker Hanusch and Elfriede Fürsich note though, it is precisely because of the significance of travel in modern society that travel writing is “such a fertile field for research” and worthy of continuing scholarly attention.

When I was given the chance to visit Professor Tim Youngs at the Centre for Travel Writing Studies in early 2016 it was an opportunity I accepted with trepidation: to be given the chance to spend time with someone so academically influential so early on in one’s career is daunting. Reading Tim’s work was one of the reasons I transitioned from being a professional travel writer to an academic in the first place. Despite my initial concerns, I had little to worry about.

There were many formal benefits to my visit to the CTWS at Nottingham Trent University: I talked about my work at a travel writing seminar at the Royal Concert Hall in Nottingham with Tim, I spoke to NTU students during an undergraduate lecture, I was introduced more thoroughly to the Studies in Travel Writing journal and I was able to give a presentation on my research on nocturnal travel writing at one of the fortnightly English Research Seminars hosted by NTU.

What was potentially more valuable however was the support and encouragement I received from CTWS members during my stay. It is often ignored in scholarly circles how worthwhile informal chats with like-minded academics can be. While travelling 16,000 kilometres for a coffee might seem extreme, it was more useful than I could have anticipated. Talking about travel and writing as it related to my career trajectory with Tim and Rebecca Butler over lunch, discussing blindness and travel with Dr Sarah Jackson over coffee, meeting with PhD students at the Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem, said to be the “oldest pub” in town, and talking about teaching travel writing with Dr Carl Thompson over tapas all gave me ideas for the future and the realisation that there is a vibrant and supportive travel writing research community at Nottingham Trent University.

Another reason I was keen to visit the CTWS was to present my research and discuss my latest book, After Dark: A Nocturnal Exploration of Madrid, which I was preparing for publication at the time.

My book is a work of travel writing. With this project I was looking to do something which addressed the representation of the ‘other’ in a more thoughtful manner than some of the contemporary travel accounts I had read, in this case through the perspective of people who live during the hours of darkness.

In 1762 Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote that we are blind half our lives because of what we miss at night. This simple statement struck a cord with me. If we writers, researchers and travellers are all blind half our lives because of what we miss during the night, what are the narratives and the perspectives on place that we’re missing out on?

This is where I saw an opportunity. Madrid is a fascinating place and it is underexplored from a travel writing point of view. Focusing on the capital of Spain allowed me to expand upon nocturnal travel writing in London and Paris from the 19th and 20th centuries in a modern setting.

My book was published by Signal Books internationally in October 2016.

Ben Stubbs, After Dark (Signal Books, 2016)

Being at the CTWS after I had finished my immersion in Madrid gave me the chance to present my research, read the first samples of the book to a supportive audience and to have some quiet writing time to finish the manuscript.

Travel writing is as important and engaged as ever. It continues to cross even more boundaries than before as it becomes a political tool, a form which can dissolve literary borders and a meaningful site for “debates about mobility, location and belonging” (Lisle 2006).

I’m a travel writing optimist and I feel lucky to have a foot in both the academic and the professional worlds of the form. I hope that exploring these sorts of areas in thorough and engaging ways will enable travel writing to continue to have academic intrigue and popular credibility. Spending time at the CTWS allowed me to develop my relationship with the form and to build valuable contacts in the study of travel writing. I would love the opportunity to return to the CTWS in the future and I highly recommend the Centre to scholars and travel writers in the field.

by tony robinson-smith

Tony Robinson-Smith graduated from NTU with a PhD in Creative Writing in July 2016. The travel memoir he wrote will be published by University of Alberta Press in Canada in September, 2017 under the title, The Dragon Run: Two Canadians, Ten Bhutanese, One Stray Dog. In this blog post, he reflects on the ways that creative production and critical inquiry interact.

The author and his wife at the highest mountain pass on their run across the Bhutanese Himalaya. Image courtesy of Tony Robinson-Smith.

Two-thirds creative and one-third critical, my dissertation consisted of excerpts from a non-fiction travel memoir set in the Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan called The Dragon Run and an accompanying commentary that examined the representation of the self in modern travel writing. My supervisors explained from the outset that a kind of dialogue should take place in my study, the creative project generating themes that invited critical inquiry and the critical work guiding me in my creative decisions.

A dominant theme that emerged in my creative project was self-revelation. I wished to communicate the thoughts and feelings of my travelling alter-ego – as he flustered, for instance, over getting a teaching contract and a work visa to go to Bhutan, struggled to understand the political developments afoot upon arrival, or reflected at length on Gross National Happiness and on contentment more generally. By studying recent works of travel, in which the writers were expressive of the personal, I was able to draw on some of the literary techniques they deployed (Jamie Zeppa’s use of dramatic monologue, for example, to display the trepidation of her younger self at the prospect of teaching overseas, Edward Abbey’s tonal shifts to express irritation over the threat to wilderness as a result of industrial tourism, or Peter Matthiessen’s lyricism to articulate a perceived merging of self with mountain in the Nepali Himalaya). My practice also led to the study of critical theories that examined self-revelation in life writing: the ways that “devices of fiction,” such as dramatic scenes and rising action, invigorate the progress of the wayfarer toward fuller understanding, or the potential of nature at her wildest to nurture larger awareness. Theory fed back into practice. I had to decide how I would distinguish (through reflective asides) my more seasoned travelling self from his newly arrived counterpart. How self-searching could I be in my reminiscences without appearing self-absorbed or guilty of glorifying wilderness for the sake of self-realisation?

Though the doctoral journey is now at an end, the creative/critical dialogue prevails as I prepare my memoir for publication with the University of Alberta Press in Canada. My critical reading continues to guide my practice. I might, my editor suggests, further develop the persona of my travelling self by bringing to the fore the other principal characters in my memoir. On our long run across the Kingdom, my wife, for instance, became “camp mum,” taking our Bhutanese student runners under her wing, making sure they ate well, did their assigned chores, and attended to their injuries, while remaining in high spirits. Through reporting on the way she treated them (and on the ways they responded) and expressing my feelings, I will inevitably say much about who I am (or who I was at the time of the trip). Irritated by the presence of smoke-belching quarry trucks on the road to the final mountain pass, my running self seeks imaginative escape by remembering a striking nature encounter. Is his memory of the golden langur in the forest - endowed through recollection with the power to soothe the beleaguered traveller - somewhat contrived, my editor wonders ... Am I guilty here of fetishizing nature?

by rebecca butler

Rebecca Butler is a Research Assistant at CTWS. She recently obtained her PhD from the School of English Literature at Bangor University, where she was supervised by (the late) Dr Stephen Colclough and Prof. Andrew Hiscock. Her thesis focusses on questions of political advocacy and literary authority in Victorian women’s travel writing surrounding the Risorgimento in Italy.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Italy - as we know it - did not exist. The peninsula was divided into separate dynasties, most of which were under Austrian rule. Dissatisfaction with these dynastic regimes galvanised a movement towards Italy’s Risorgimento (1815-1861) or political resurgence, culminating in the Proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy as an independent nation state on 17 March 1861.

Despite the prevailing gender ideology that politics was beyond their proper sphere, British middle-class women were conspicuous in their advocacy for the Risorgimento. In fact, Pamela Gerrish Nunn argues that Victorian women’s discourses surrounding the Italian question provide an index of their shifting role and representation in British society in the decades leading up to the suffragist campaigns.

Travel writing is an apposite genre through which to examine the extent of this discursive engagement. The greater accessibility of the Continent made it easier for upper and middle-class women to travel, albeit under male protection. If purportedly journeying in pursuit of health or cultural enlightenment, Victorian women also enjoyed unprecedented political authority as eye-witnesses to the Risorgimento. Many female tourists brought material in their luggage to supply General Garibaldi and his army with their famed “red shirts”. Small wonder that customs officers ransacked tourists’ suitcases “as if […] a Mazzini would be found hidden in every carpet-bag”, as one traveller August Ludwig von Rochau complained. A few women travellers even acted as political messengers for the revolutionary exile. More frequently (and more legitimately), however, female tourists acted as emissaries for the Risorgimento through their travel accounts.

It was with the particular aim of raising money for the revolutionary exile Ferdinando Gatteschi that Mary Shelley published her travel book Rambles in Germany and Italy […] (1844). Significantly, however, Shelley did not discuss her revolutionary fundraising efforts with her publisher Edward Moxon. Instead, she pitched Rambles in conventionally feminine terms as “light” and “amusing”, avoiding mention of politics. Although often transgressed in actuality, the Victorian middle-class gender ideology of separate spheres nonetheless affected the critical reception of women’s travel writing, impacting on women's political engagement in print.

The etymology of the word Risorgimento, which means a resurgence, rebirth or resurrection, lent itself well to feminine mythologies of the movement. The allegorical representation of Italy as Italia – a woman in chains – further accommodated proto-feminist interpretations of Italian nationalism. One book in particular, Madame de Staël’s Corinne, ou Italie (1807), solidified the imaginative association of Italy with a woman’s country, as a space where women could (paradoxically) enjoy greater freedoms than at home. A bestseller into the 1870s, Corinne offered a flattering model for later women travel writers to adapt by imagining Italy as the home of female creative genius. Declared “[T]he image of our beautiful Italy”, the eponymous heroine also provided a modern allegory for Italy’s political situation, imbricating the woman question with the Italian question.

Women travel writers typically approached the Italian question through domestic discourses. Some – like Shelley – emphasised women’s role in the rebirth of the young nation as civic mothers. This strategy was also used by Mazzini to rally Englishwomen in support of the cause. Others, such as Florence Nightingale, framed their political inquiries as spiritual pilgrimages with Italy’s moral regeneration or resurrection at the bourn. However, as the Risorgimento took a violent turn with the 1848 revolutions, it became more difficult to accommodate Italian politics to conventionally feminine discourses. Accordingly, the didactic travel writer Selina Bunbury asserted her literary authority against Italian revolutionism. Others like Margaret Dunbar grew strangely quiet about the Italian question, focussing instead on a picturesque Italy, sanitized of revolutionary violence.

The relationship between the campaign for female suffrage and Italian independence was therefore much more complicated than the Corinne myth might suggest. Victorian women’s Italianate travel writing may provide an index of their changing role in British society. However, it also evidences women writers’ strategic engagement with the Risorgimento according to its shifting political capital in Britain. Rather than propelling a mutually reinforcing, proto-feminist narrative of women’s liberal engagement with the Risorgimento, Victorian women's travel accounts more often reveal these two campaigns as competing sites of authority.

REFERENCES

Bunbury, Selina, A Visit to the Catacombs, or First Christian Cemeteries at Rome: and a Midnight Visit to Mount Vesuvius (London: W.W. Robinson, 1849)

We welcome applications from prospective students wishing to pursue a PhD on travel writing under the guidance of a supervision team led by Professor Tim Youngs at the Centre for Travel Writing Studies.

There is no restriction as to historical or geographical focus or type of critical approach, but proposals relating to post-medieval travel writing and any of the following areas may be especially welcome: North America; Italy; India; travel writing and modes of transport; the poetry of travel; modernism and travel; postcolonialism and travel; creative-critical work; radical travel writing; diasporic travel narratives; travel writing and the Midlands. We also welcome single-author studies, particularly of unjustly neglected figures.

The studentship covers the cost of fees at home/EU rates and includes an annual stipend in line with AHRC bursary rates (£14296) for 3 years.The successful applicant will be expected to support the Centre’s activities.

The School of Arts and Humanities seeks to appoint a Permanent Lecturer in English from 1 October 2016. The post affords an opportunity to join the Centre for Travel Writing Studies, as travel writing is one of the areas of interest. Candidates are sought with specialisms in two or more of the following: Travel writing, Romantic literature and Gothic literature. A broad knowledge and understanding of the major subject areas within English Studies is also required.

Opportunity for a fully funded PhD studentship in the Literature of Travel at the Centre for Travel Writing Studies as part of the NTU Vice-Chancellor's Researcher Development Scheme.

We welcome applications from prospective PhD students wishing to work on a travel writing project under the guidance of a supervision team led by Professor Tim Youngs. There is no restriction as to historical or geographical focus or critical approach, but proposals relating to any of the following areas may be especially welcome: North America; Italy; India; travel writing and modes of transport; the poetry of travel; modernism and travel; postcolonialism and travel; creative-critical work; radical travel writing; diasporic travel narratives; travel writing and the Midlands. We also welcome single-author studies, particularly of unjustly neglected figures. The successful applicant will be expected to support CTWS activities.

Exceptional candidates will have the chance to follow up their PhDs with a one year position at NTU as a full-time Postdoctoral Research Associate.